Film Scoring Faculty

"The actual end result—the music—is what you need to be thinking about; whatever tools you use are just tools. Just because you're working with a computer, you're still trying to create art. You have to treat technology as an instrument that's no different from spending six hours a day in a practice room practicing your guitar. Whether it's a computer or a mixing board or a guitar, you have to make it kind of sing and play for you."

"The most significant thing a film composer brings to the table is the ability to emotionally connect with a film and express that through music. If you’re not able to do that, you’re not going to be very good, no matter how much training you’ve had. This is why it’s so important for composers to trust their instincts. That’s one of the main things I’ve learned—I do best when I don’t get in my own way and over-analyze things. There is a magical thing that happens that is almost like alchemy when music and image link up in a way neither you nor the director could have predicted. Those are the moments I live for."

"I try to emphasize the idea that we're constantly making a series of decisions, and that the goal is to satisfy a dramatic intention. In an orchestration class, I can't teach kids what notes to write. I can't stand over them and say, 'Write this note and this note,' or 'You must use this combination of instruments here.' But I can show them how to identify styles, genres, or gestures they're making through the music that the audience will relate to. I can show them how to make decisions about what instruments, what combinations, to use to achieve a certain effect. It's decision-making and overall concept that I tend to emphasize."

"Even if some of my students don't go into careers in video games, I think these are important concepts. How to structure nonlinear media, the applications for that go beyond video games. We're having digitally mediated interactive experiences all around us every day. Going through the subway turnstile, there's audio feedback; increasingly, we're seeing interactive kiosks in advertising contexts or shopping venues, museum installations, things like that."

"In teaching the technology, I try to do projects that I know will be the fastest way to get material across to the students. I want them to learn the essence of something so that they can work with it right away. I also try to develop task-oriented tutorials on what students need to know to get something done, then hopefully they can go on from there. I point the way for students to keep learning on their own."

"One of the greatest reasons for having talent is to be of service to others, so I want my students to trust their intuition and imagination to come up with ways to make a living within that. Part of creative conviction is to understand: Who are you really? What are you doing on this earth? These are very big questions, but with the privilege of being an artist comes the responsibility to address them. Otherwise, how do you grow into yourself?"

"There are two parts to creating. One is exploring and the other is culling. If you confuse them, then you won't get anywhere. Mick Goodrick once said to me, 'When you swim, there is stroking and then there's gliding. And if you only stroke you won't be able to swim, because you won't get anywhere. You need to be able to glide in between strokes.' There's a period of time when you are capturing the things floating around through you, and you have to be very careful not to be judgmental at that point. There is also the point when you need to be critical and throw things out, but if you go there at the wrong point in the process you'll simply muck it up."

"Knowing how to collaborate is so important. Music for media—whether it's games, interactive media, film, or television—doesn't stand alone; it works with the other elements and that means that you're working with other people. We promote collaboration in a lot of classes in our department and in extracurricular activities, and we're continuing to broaden the possibilities for collaboration in the curriculum."

"I believe in the complete musician. I think in order to make it in the real world you have to have a specialty like film scoring, orchestration, or production, but you also need to know how to play your instrument, you need to read. Twenty-something years ago I was graduating from Berklee. Then I went to play music, then I went to record, then I went to film scoring for almost twenty years, and now I come full circle back to Berklee as a teacher. So I think if you really want to make it as a professional musician, you try to be, as much as you can, a complete musician, someone who can perform, write, orchestrate, arrange, produce, do film scoring, do theater, do ballet, do other forms."

"I try to give my students practical working knowledge—to not only understand the concepts but to see how it all comes together. I'll show examples of feature film projects that I've worked on; I'll bring films into the classroom and tear them apart and say, 'Now, here's where we start. Here's how we build the music cues for this particular scene. Here's how we go about editing them.' Just showing students the overall process flow."

"I emphasize different things in different classes, but professionalism and sold technical skills need to be at the core of what we do. At the same time, my goal is to always maximize musical expression and to gain a deeper understanding of how to apply that to film or any other visual media."

"Video game audio is a multidisciplinary field; it's so varied and massive in scope, with about six disciplines combined into one. On one hand, you have to be the John Williams: you have to write the music. But on the other hand, for it to work with the video game, there's also the logic of how all that music is going to work together in the game and how that stuff interacts. For composers, you have to wrap your head around some new concepts that you don't encounter as a linear film composer. Those things include branching and looping, and being able to transition from one place to another very quickly. In a game, you have to plan for all the variances of how a player might actually be interacting with the game."

"Done well, a great game score makes a player feel the music was specifically written for their choices, actions, and decisions. And providing students with tools to accomplish that is the focus of my teaching here at Berklee."